If there's anything that looks more LONELY than a sailboat in the middle of the desert, then I don't know what it is.

We were paying a monthly fee to keep Soulstice out at Lake Pleasant, and given the fact that we've now bought this new house and the further extrapolation that we're gonna be broke for the rest of our lives thereby, bringing it home just made good sense.

But now that poor boat looks just plain LONELY.

I'm hoping that our plans play out - that having the boat here means that we'll actually work on it more often and be more involved with it. But right now it's 105F out there, and the boat is on the west side of the house - so I don't have any inclination to go out and visit with my sailboat. I have even LESS inclination to open the hatch and go below and work on the electrical system box.

Ethel's made a lot of noise about going up to Lake Powell later this month, but with gas topping $4/gal, it would be quite expensive indeed to tote the boat that far up hill (and even that far from the equator - as Treebeard pointed out, going north is basically going uphill, because you're fighting centrifigal force).

So we're thinking instead about a long weekend back out at Lake Pleasant. I hope so; but that begs the question about what we'll do with the doggies while we're gone. That's one problem with having dogs - they simply refuse to go into stasis or hibernation when you want to go somewhere.

There's the boat, and the "vacation" - and then there are all of the things that we should be doing instead. Just for fun, let's see what I can list from memory regarding current or pending projects:

Installing irrigation system with drip and sprinklers
Doing the actual planting (trees and cacti)
Spreading approx. 10 tons of gravel in the yard
Finishing the BamaBath (crimson and white bathroom and alcove)
Painting of bedrooms and offices and west hallway
Four ceiling fans on the porch
Four ceiling speakers mounted in porch ceiling
Setting 28 anchors in grante at the top of 14 routes along Saguaro Heaven ridgetop
Finishing Astronomy Hacks and Celestial Sampler (2 telescope books)
Getting the telescope up to the Mogollon Ridge while Jupiter is visible next month
Completing the installation of storage hooks and HyLofts in the Garage Mahal
Getting the Neuros OSD working, aquiring a 2TB external harddrive, and recording over 1000 DVDs
Reading Chi Running
Training for AFC half marathon

...that's about it, off of the top of my head, although I've got some nagging "but what about...?" thoughts indicating that I'm forgetting some things.

So, no - we're probably not going to get too much done on the boat this summer.